Notes for a Society of Performance: On Dance, Sports, Museums, and Their Users

SATURDAY 7TH FEB || 16:00 - 18:00 || REYKJAVIK DANCE ATELIER

What if Guy Debord was to resurrect under a commission to rewrite his Society of Spectacle for the current form of capitalism, characterized as neoliberal and post-Fordist, entertaining the notions of experience and service (economy), as well as knowledge (production)? In my imaginary exercise of a theoretical pamphlet for2014, Debord would be ready to relinquish the concepts of “image” and representation” and substitute “performance” for them. Society of performance, in difference to the society of spectacle, entails another ideological mechanism, away from the ocular regime of false consciousness or blindness, distorted image or speech, toward a conscious and self-monitored re-embodied doing and showing doing. We are speaking here of a ritualized motion based on the psychosocial power of embodiment, the affective-experiential ground of persuasive expression by which the subject finds a more real sense of the self.

The talk presents five theoretical stories about homo performans in sports and everyday life, in dancing solo and the museum of the self.